Posted on June 20th, 2015 by Joy Schwabach
Joy’s nephew recently graduated from a flip phone to a smart phone. The one thing he misses is the long battery life of the flip phone. What if you could fully charge an iPhone in five minutes? A charger that can do just that is slated to come out in August. This idea so electrified (so to speak) the Kickstarter community that “Pronto,” the forthcoming fast charger, quickly raised $375,249 in seed money. (That was $325,000 more than they were looking for.) The basic device will cost $89 and hold three charges. The super model will hold nine charges. Either will fully charge an iPhone in five minutes. You can pre-order one for June delivery from pronto-battery.backerkit.com.
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Filed under: batteries | Comments Off on THAT’S FAST
Posted on June 18th, 2015 by Joy Schwabach
“Zepp Tennis 2” works with any Zepp sensor to show you what your tennis serve looks like in 3D. It works with iPhones, iPads, Android phones and tablets. Check out similar apps from Adidas (soccer) and Babolat (tennis). “Google Goggles” is a free app for Android/iPhone/iPad that identifies images for you. The other day, someone at the question and answer site, Quora.com, asked Joy to identify a picture of a fruit. If Bob had been there, he would have told her it was the Carambola, or so-called “star” fruit. Not having Bob there, Joy took a picture of it with her phone camera and the Goggles app showed her similar pictures, with links to identifying text. Ah ha! She even […]
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Filed under: apps | 1 Comment »
Posted on June 16th, 2015 by Joy Schwabach
The information you get from “fitness” bands may be off by as much as 40 percent, according to Gregory Welk, an Iowa State University kinesiology professor, who tested seven of them. The top two bands were off just over 15 percent and the worst one was off 40 percent. There were $1.4 billion worth of these fitness trackers sold last year and the market continues to be hot. Professor Welk admits they’re still a valuable tool to achieve fitness.
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Filed under: apps, fitness, health | Comments Off on ARE FITNESS BANDS RELIABLE?
Posted on June 15th, 2015 by Joy Schwabach
Our screen kept nagging us with messages that we needed to update Adobe Flash Player, a program necessary for video playback on the web. But since we knew we already had the latest version , we ignored it.
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Filed under: anti-virus, security, spyware | Comments Off on WATCH OUT FOR THE UPDATE AD
Posted on June 13th, 2015 by Joy Schwabach
More than 2.1 million Americans still use AOL’s dial-up connection, perhaps unnecessarily. We know two people right off the bat who think they have to pay $20 a month to hold on to their AOL email accounts. They’ve been paying for years.
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Filed under: AOL | 2 Comments »
Posted on June 11th, 2015 by Joy Schwabach
“Waze” is a free alternative to Google Maps (also free). It calls out turn-by-turn directions, just as Google Maps does. Just tap the microphone and speak your destination, or type it in. Then tap “navigate.” For those who want more, Waze keeps you up to date on traffic conditions and can even tell you when your friends arrived at the destination. (If five minutes have gone by and they still haven’t got out of the car and wrung the bell, they’re probably arguing about whether to see you at all.)
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Filed under: apps, GPS, maps | Comments Off on GETTING THERE
Posted on June 10th, 2015 by Joy Schwabach
“Duplicate File Finder,” for Windows XP on up, from Ashisoft.com, is a free tool for removing duplicates. Unlike many free programs of this type, it doesn’t download spyware and free offers of junk. We asked it to scan our “One Drive” folder (Microsoft’s storage service). It found 716 duplicates, wasting half a gigabyte of disk space. Like all other programs of this type, eliminating duplicates is a bit tedious. For safety, it requires you to check a box next to each duplicate. If you accidentally mark both copies for deletion, it prompts you to unmark one of them. If you don’t have time to review the duplicates, click “save results” and go over them later. The program sends dupes to […]
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Filed under: free stuff, photos | Comments Off on FINDING DUPLICATES
Posted on June 9th, 2015 by Joy Schwabach
A reader asked us to find a service that would consolidate her Facebook, Flickr, Shutterfly, and Picasa photos all in one place. This is the holy grail of photo organizing. Flickr.com‘s new tool “Uploadr” is at least halfway to that goal. Any time a new photo comes into your computer, whether from a camera card, your phone, or an email attachment, it automatically uploads it to your private Flickr account. Uploadr also consolidates anything you’ve saved to Apple’s “iPhoto” or “Dropbox” online accounts. (Flickr is a division of Yahoo.com, one of the largest Internet search engines; like Google, it has many features that are strictly its own. There is no charge to sign up.) You’ll be able to see your […]
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Filed under: photos | Comments Off on ORGANIZING PHOTOS
Posted on June 8th, 2015 by Joy Schwabach
We’ve never tried “Hinge,” which is a fast-growing dating service. We didn’t try it because we’re married and happy about it. Now that a widowed friend has tried it, we’re adding a few words of caution. Hinge.co is a free app that finds matches for you from friends of your Facebook friends. By confining the field, they claim you’re more likely to find suitable matches. When our widowed friend started Hinge on her iPad, she was startled to see her adult son’s face beaming up at her; she was afraid it was about to match her with his friends, despite the huge age differences. No one had ever disconnected as fast as she did. She didn’t realize the app just […]
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Filed under: apps, social networks | Comments Off on ONLINE DATING REVISITED
Posted on June 7th, 2015 by Joy Schwabach
It happened to us again last week. We were walking along and saw a teenager who wasn’t on her cellphone. Change is the only constant, futurists say; we may be on the short end of that. A study by Microsoft has found that the average young person’s attention span has dropped to about eight seconds. By way of comparison, the average attention span of a goldfish is nine seconds. Consider goldfish for your next job opening.
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Filed under: trends | Comments Off on HIRE A GOLDFISH
